Why did I choose to become a Product Manager?
Being a PM is all the rage these days(has been for a while now) and the funny part is that this demand is in-fact increasing at an unprecedented rate unlike 5–10 years ago. If you would’ve asked me 10 years back:
You: Psstt.. Hey! Wanna become a UI/UX designer?
Me: Get away from me weirdo.
You: How about a PM then?
Me: I can become the Prime Minister?! O_O
You get the point. Now as a good PM, I should probably throw in some data, some fancy charts and graphs, and some underlying assumptions to support and validate my argument but who said anything about being serious here? I‘m not writing no PRD(Product Requirement Documentation) so get off my lawn! If you want to be a PM, learn to do your own goddamn primary/secondary/tertiary/septenary/duodenary/… research. If you’re already a PM, you know what I’m talking about.
The point is, this is not a self-help-become-a-PM blog. You may OR may not learn anything by the end but you can certainly have a good time and those are hard to come by in the middle of this crazy pandemic.
So here goes nothing.
Unlike the usual developer-turned-PM or <enter fancy B-School>-to-PM, I was into marketing at my previous firm.
Disclaimer: I did study MBA and followed the typical milestones of Sharma Ji (sorry it’s an Indian pun).
Time for a quick backstory:
I had barely survived the 4 years of engineering in ECE and my dad now wanted me to study M.Tech on top of it. I was like.. Neeeooope!
You know what I wanted to do? Study music.
Oops. Too poor.
How about MS in the U.S. of A.?
Again, too poor.
How about a govt job? Civil services?
Too much bureaucracy.
How about the army?
Seen the army life since birth as dad was in army. Thanks but no thanks. Too much bureaucracy.
Fine! How about any job in any private corp.?
Did I tell you how much I love music?
Anyway…my last decent option if I wasn’t planning to become a full time musician was MBA so I prepared for CAT(India’s equivalent of GMAT) just few months before the exam. Fun Fact: I was one of the first few students who bought the CAT preparation tablet courses by BYJU!
Yep yep, India’s latest and greatest unicorn start-up whose entire business model revolves around ripping gullible Indian parents off of their hard earned money, was perfected on OG BYJU students like me. We’ll leave this story for another time.
So I prepared what I could, tanked the exam, applied to whatever Tier-2 B-Schools I could, cleared interview for a bunch of those, and chose the most affordable B-School I could get my hands on.
MBA was meh(another story) but the blessing in disguise was that after two years, I was the only one from my batch who got placed in the only B2B-SaaS-product-based company that came for recruitment. So hurray!
-end of backstory-
Okay, I digressed quite a lot but it’s important to know this backstory to stitch everything together at the end. So here I was, a marketer by heart. My daily work revolved around anything and everything that you can think of when it comes to digital marketing, and more. I was a happy guy running Search and GDN ads, improving my product’s SERP rank, doing webinars and competitor analysis, attending global events, trying to persuade Gartner analysts(get a load of this guy) on why our product deserves to be in the challenger or at the least visionaries quadrant in their latest MQ after so many years because look at this fancy feature we’re gonna push next quarter and look at our growing revenue while you sit there and mint money doing absolutely nothing but judging and grading products without even knowing why the market leader did what they did and why it doesn’t make sense for smaller companies to do the same at this moment, writing blogs and PRs, helping in sales collaterals, the whole shebang.
In short, I didn’t even know the P of PM.
Until I made some friends(in the company) who just joined the org as a PM or were striving to become one. It was like a whole new world to me. Exciting. Invigorating. I was instantly gravitated towards it and soon knew it’s something I would eventually transition towards in my career. We would spend a lot of time talking about new products, sharing resources, discussing markets, how they’re gonna evolve, how we can improve our own products, yada yada. However, I was still torn cuz I did like marketing equally. I was really comfortable in this domain. Moreover, I just started leading the marketing front for a pretty much ignored product within our roster and the results were tremendous! This lead to me learning even more about this new market, it’s competitors, and realising where and how we exactly lacked. A really senior product manager started taking interest in what I was trying to do and asked me to set up a presentation for a lot of upper management folks including the Director of Engineering and Product. I was like HELL YEAH!
I researched the shit out of the market, competitors, spoke with existing customers, partners, sales team, customer support team, joined bulletin boards, and did whatever I could to create a sick slide deck with all the SWOT analysis, and graphs, and pie charts, and market forecasts. The gist of this slide deck and the 2 hour long presentation was that we needed to basically mould two of our existing products into one, and launch it as a brand new product in the market. Even if we could grab 5% of the existing market in the next 3 years, our revenue will easily increase by 5x.
Surprisingly, it went well! The upper management all agreed that there certainly is a massive market opportunity which we can benefit from BUT we just do not have the resources for it as of now.
You know what, I was still happy because essentially it meant I could get an opportunity to work on this so called new product WHEN we have resources. Till then, let’s just focus on improving the current one. Days went on and I kept speaking with the existing customers, trying to understand their pain points and there’s one which always came up, no matter which customer I spoke with. The UNHOLY remote control/connect feature.
Now if you do not know what a remote control feature is, here’s a brief explanation:
Me: Oh crap, my laptop is behaving weirdly. *sends an email to sys admin*
Sys admin: Whatsup?
Me: Laptop broke down.
Sys admin: Let me take a look
*proceeds to connect remotely to my computer through the remote control/connect feature from the confines of his own desk*
Sys admin: Why do you have 100GB worth of movies in your computer? That’s the reason it’s slowing down.
Me: *Sweats profusely* Oh right, I forgot about that. Let me delete those.
In short: Whatever products like TeamViewer, Bomgar, Anydesk, etc. does.
So remote control/connect was one of those features in our product which our customers never really used(because it sucked. surprise surprise) and would instead pay and use any of the above products I mentioned. It just helped with their workflow and they didn’t mind the extra expenses. So the logical question which came to my mind was why aren’t we integrating with these products? In fact all of our competitors had their own dedicated remote control/connect feature and yet they still had integrations with most of such 3rd party products. Then why aren’t we doing the same?
I go to the PM who handles my product and suggest him this idea.
His response was(this part actually happened): Why? Why do you want to integrate with 3rd party products? What’s wrong with our feature? Let them use ours. We have one of the best remote control/connect features out there, and no, we’re not going to integrate with any of these 3rd party solutions.
No matter what I said, I couldn’t convince him otherwise. In fact he was offended that a marketer would come and give him directions on how to do his job.
That, ladies and gentleman, was the day I was certain that I want to become a Product Manager.
So to close the loop, why did I actually choose to become a Product Manager? Was it out of spite? Was it because everyone was doing the same? Was it because I was(am) inherently curious? Was it because I chose to do MBA instead of Music? Or was it a result of the unintended consequences of all the things which I did throughout my entire life which eventually led me to that conversation with the said Product Manager above?
Beats me if I know.
P.S. — Would love to hear your story on how did you end up in the role you are in today. Leave comments.
Also, remember the million dollar product which never got built earlier? They’re building it now. Cheers!